


Spies on Ice

by TheMangosity



Category: Spies In Disguise (2019)
Genre: Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Sleepy Cuddles, Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28147347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMangosity/pseuds/TheMangosity
Summary: A mission goes wrong and Lance and Walter end up trapped on a snowy mountain together. They'll be okay as long as they stick together.
Relationships: Walter Beckett/Lance Sterling
Comments: 4
Kudos: 61
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Spies on Ice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sparcina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparcina/gifts).



> Merry Christmas! Happy Yuletide! I love Spies in Disguise! It's so funny XD I hope you enjoy the story!

There was a reason bad guys always loved these freezing cold snowy mountain bases. No one in their right mind would ever want to come here to accidentally stumble upon their maniacal plots, no one except H.T.U.V.

There was only one guy they ever chose to send on the coldest missions, and that guy was Lance Sterling, or at least it seemed that way to him. Now he came with a bonus, his new sidekick…er…partner, Walter. The plan was for Lance to infiltrate the base while Walter hacked their system and disabled security from a plane overhead.

It was strictly reconnaissance only. They were to get in, get the intel, and get out, and under no circumstances were they to engage the enemy.

That plan was out the window. Lance could hear them give the order to ready the anti-aircraft missiles. There was no time to warn the pilot and Walter that they were in danger.

Lance was a pigeon as he watched the plane go down, so there wasn’t anything he could do. Not that he would have been able to do much as a human, but being a pigeon made him feel that much more helpless. The plane fell from the sky with smoke trailing behind it, until it disappeared into a forest of pine trees in the distance. Lance didn’t hear the crash, but he felt like he knew the moment when the plane hit the ground.

“Walter, come in, over,” he said into the pigeon-sized communicator attached to his collar, but all he heard was static from Walter’s end.

From his place on the roof, Lance could see a couple of mercs pilling into their tank-like snowmobile. The plume of smoke slowly drifting into the sky would lead them straight to the site of the crash. If Walter had survived, they would finish the job.

 _Not if I get there first_. Lance flew off towards the crash as fast as his tiny wings could carry him. He knew his black feathers stood out starkly against the snow, but he was still as invisible as if he were a dove. At least that was still in their favor, but nothing else was. This mission was a total bust.

* * *

Lance perched on a tree branch completely out of breath and freezing his tail feathers off. The crash was farther away than it looked. Those grunts had gotten there before him, but it wasn’t too late. They were only just starting to pick through the wreckage, and there was no sign of Walter.

The plane was a completely wrecked, but the cockpit was still intact. There was a chance Walter and the pilot had survived and managed to escape.

One of the grunts checked inside the cockpit and called, “Mission accomplished.”

Lance’s stomach dropped. Sadness and grief were very different as a pigeon, but so very much the same. Walter was gone. They had hardly gotten to go on any missions together since forming their new task force. Walter’s young life had been cut short before giving all he had to this world. It was too cruel.

“Let’s get back to base. I hear they got in that new hazelnut coffee.”

“Are you kidding? What are we standing around here for? Let’s go!”

Lance gritted his pigeon teeth. People were dead and these jokers were more concerned about the coffee in the bad guy break room? On some level, he understood. In this line of work, sometimes you had to distance yourself from what you were doing to get the job done, but Lance couldn’t do that this time. This time, it was personal.

He watched with narrowed eyes as the goons headed back over to their vehicle, still chatting about that coffee. He was calculating how he would take them out when suddenly one of them tripped over seemingly nothing and fell down with a high-pitched shriek.

The snow at the guy’s feet rippled and turned to static for a second, and Lance wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Then it hit him—it was a hologram.

Well, it had been a hologram. Now it was Walter, lying in the snow with his hands over his head. He laughed nervously as he looked up at the bewildered grunts. “Hey, guys. I was just…looking for the bathroom?”

The sight of Walter alive sent relief flooding into his pigeon body. Relief was weird as a pigeon too, but his relief was short lived as one of the grunts reached for his gun.

Without wasting another second, Lance zipped out of the tree and flapped his wings in the guy’s face, pecking him on the head.

“Ow! Get away from me! Dumb bird!”

“Is that a pigeon?” was all the stupid grunt had time to say—was all any of them ever had time to say—before Lance made the switch back to human. The transformation no longer hurt like it had that first excruciating time, but it still felt really weird. He didn’t think he would ever get used to the transformation from man to beast, or in this case, beast to man.

He kneed the guy in the face and swung around to punch the other guy who he knew would be there.

Except he wasn’t there. He had dragged Walter away in the commotion and had him in a headlock, his gun pointed straight at his head.

Lance held his hands out. “Hey, easy. We can talk this out, right?”

“I’m not talking anything out with you,” the guys spat. “I know who you are. If I bring in Lance Sterling, I’ll get the promotion of my life. Now don’t move or I’ll shoot your buddy.”

Walter held something up and grinned. “That’ll be kind of hard without _this_.” He tossed whatever it was to Lance, who caught it out of thin air with his lighting fast reflexes. It was the cartridge to the guy’s gun. So the kid had finally figured out how to pull off the misdirection trick.

The grunt looked really confused like he hadn’t figured out what had happened, and Walter elbowed him in the stomach. These guys were always so loaded up with armor that he didn’t feel a thing. You had to aim for the face, and that’s exactly what Lance did. He wound up like he had in college baseball and threw the cartridge straight at the guy’s face.

The guy shouted and let go of Walter long enough for him to wiggle away, but he didn’t get far. He cried out and fell to the ground, and that’s when Lance remembered that Walter had just minutes ago been in a life-threatening plane crash and could be hurt pretty bad.

Before the grunt could catch his bearings, Lance ran up and kicked his lights out. He was unconscious before his body hit the snow.

“Out cold, huh?” Walter joked, but he couldn’t hide the pain in his voice.

Lance knelt down next to him and looked him over, but he couldn’t see any injuries through Walter’s puffy winter coat. “What happened? I thought your holograms were supposed to be cloaking the plane.”

“The enemy was sending out an interference signal,” Walter said, looking slightly guilty. “It scrambled everything. I tried to account for it, but there wasn’t enough time for me to write a new program.” He hung his head. “The pilot didn’t make it.”

“Hey. It wasn’t your fault.” He squeezed Walter’s shoulder. “Listen, sometimes a mission goes wrong, and you lose people. It’s never easy, but you can’t blame yourself, okay?”

“If you say so.”

Lance patted him on the back. “Now, can you get up?”

“Not really. The crash did a number on us.”

“Us? Oh no. Don’t tell me.”

On cue, Lovey popped up out of the front of Walter’s shirt and rubbed against Lance’s face. She was just as attracted to him when he was a human as when he was a pigeon, which greatly confused Lance.

“Girl, get off me.” He pushed her off, but he was smiling. “Why do you always have to be so lovey dovey? Aaaand…now I get why your name is Lovey.”

Walter laughed and then winced in pain.

Lance accessed the computer in his suit and initiated a bio scan. A neon blue light washed over Walter and the suit began its analysis. “PATIENT HAS MINOR LACERATIONS. BROKEN LEFT LEG. BODY TEMPERATURE IS BELOW NORMAL.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Walter said, hugging his arms. “Lance, those guys’ll be on our tail.”

“Don’t worry. We still have some time before they come looking for those two jokers.” He pointed to the grunts, who were still completely unconscious. If this was a cartoon, they would have little yellow birds flying around their heads. “Come on. I saw some caves on my way over here. We can hide out there until the coast is clear. Think you can make it?”

“Sure, I can manage. Just help me up.”

He pulled Walter’s arm around his shoulder and hauled him to his feet. Even with Lance’s support, he was still in a lot of pain. “This isn’t going to work. I’ve got you.” With little effort, he swept Walter up into his arms. He was even lighter than he was expecting.

“H-hey! I can walk!”

“Yeah, about as fast as a pigeon. Trust me, I know.”

Walter grumbled but didn’t say anything else as Lance carried him off to the shelter.

* * *

By the time they made it to the cave Lance had seen overhead, there was hardly any light left in the sky. It was a lot more out in the open than he’d hoped. If he’d been able to spot this cave as a pigeon, the enemy would surely be able to spot it in a plane or a helicopter.

“Don’t worry about it.” Walter had gotten a lot more relaxed and happy since Lance gave him that morphine. He pulled a laptop from inside the front of his shirt. “I can set up a hologram so they won’t know there’s even a cave here.”

“Forgive me for asking, but didn’t you say the enemy was scrambling your hologram?”

Walter launched into an elaborate explanation about the hologram that Lance didn’t understand, but he nodded along like he did. “…Okay, I’m just going to trust that all that means you fixed the problem.”

“Of course. I’ve got this.”

“Right. Listen, I’m going to go make sure there are no bears or coyotes hiding in the back.”

“I bet you could talk to them if you turned into a pigeon.” He was already typing away on the laptop.

“I don’t think a bear’s going to want to reason with me when I’m ten times smaller than him.”

Lance slipped away to let Walter work and went all the way to the back of the cave with his thousand-lumen flashlight, but there were no bears or coyotes. The coast was clear, and there was even a back exit in case they needed to make a quick getaway.

When he got back, Walter had already set up the hologram to cover up the mouth of the cave. It was a transparent image of rocks, which he assumed was solid from the other side.

He had also set up a holographic campfire that was almost convincing, but not nearly as warm as the real thing.

Walter was lying beside it with his coat pulled around his body, but he was still shivering. “Any bears?” he asked as Lance approached.

“No, just ghosts.”

Walter laughed nervously. “I hope you’re joking.”

Without answering, Lance sat down on the other side of the fire and stretched his legs out. “You know that coat’s not warm enough for the snow?” It might have been okay for a brisk evening in D.C., but definitely not subzero temperatures.

“Yeah, I now that now. The plane had heat and butt warmers. I didn’t think we would crash land. What about you?” He motioned at Lance’s perfectly tailored suit. “How are you not freezing?”

“State of the art technology.” He straightened out the already flawless lapels and grinned. “It regulates my body temperature.”

“Whoa. When do I get one of those?”

“When you earn it.”

“What? I can turn a guy into a pigeon! I think I’ve earned it.”

The face Walter made had Lance laughing out loud. “Come here.” He scooted closer and hugged Walter to his side. “Better?”

“Y-yeah,” Walter stammered. “Toasty.”

“Here.” Lance took off Walter’s coat and spread it out on the ground. Walter didn’t object as Lance gently laid him down on the coat. “I’m going to warm you up, okay?”

Walter nodded. “Okay.” Lance’s suit protected him from the cold ground as he lay down on the cave floor beside Walter. He scooted closer. “Go ahead and get some sleep. I’ll keep lookout.”

“I can’t go to sleep. What if they find us?” But Walter was already looking sleepy.

“Don’t worry. I’ll wake you up if we need to make a getaway.”

Walter yawned. “Sounds good to me.” He curled up against Lance’s side. “Night, Lance.”

“Good night, Walter.”

In a few minutes, Walter was snoring really loudly. It wasn’t cute at all, but somehow Lance didn’t mind. He wrapped an arm around Walter’s waist and pulled him closer. He wouldn’t let this kid die out here. He meant too much to him.

Lance stayed awake all night listening to the nighttime bugs and Walter’s snores and the artificial crackle of the fire, but the enemy never found them. Eventually, Lance fell asleep too, curled up with Walter in the glow of the holographic fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Like I said, I love Spies in Disguise! I'm glad I got assigned to write for it. In one of your prompts you mentioned a deserted island and cuddling, so I took that idea but changed the location to a snowy mountain. I hope you liked it! Merry Christmas!


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